Company memory: five layers to make it last

A company memory brings together what makes your company work the way it does. But putting everything in the same place, at the same level, quickly produces a contradictory catch-all. The solution: organise knowledge in layers, each with its role, its pace and its owner.

Layer 1: The foundation of fundamentals

What applies to the whole company, whatever the department: purpose, vision, mission, values, strategy, goals and indicators, target customers and markets, offers and prices, business model, brand and tone, organisation and roles, priorities and roadmap, principles, shared rules, data and security policies, key decisions, shared vocabulary.

• Pace: rarely changes.
• Owner: management, which approves it.
• Use: all agents and all teams refer to it.

Layer 2: The business domains

One business domain per area of activity (sales, finance, customer relations), with its vocabulary, its processes, its rules, its decisions and its ways of working. Business domains are added to the foundation, one by one: the memory is cumulative, and its value grows with use.

• Pace: changes often.
• Owner: the business domain lead.
• Use: the agents and teams of the business domain.

Layer 3: The trade-off rules

What is decided without a person, what is escalated, and to whom. When two priorities conflict (deliver fast or check more), which one wins? These rules turn intentions into decisions that can be applied, by a person as by an agent.

Layer 4: The usage rules

The governance of the memory itself: who writes, who approves, how often. Without them, the memory fills up with competing versions or stops being kept.

Layer 5: Access

Each agent is connected to the right scope of knowledge, with its rights, its approvals, its checks and its owners. The customer service agent reads the customer relations layer and the foundation; it has no business reading HR files.

The principles that hold it all together

1. A single source for each type of information. A rule lives in one place; other documents point to it. Two copies always end up diverging.
2. Dated and versioned. Every change is dated, and you know which version was authoritative at which time.
3. Readable by people and by agents. Clear, structured sentences, with no internal jargon left unexplained.
4. A lead for each business domain. They keep the knowledge of their business domain up to date, directly; management approves the shared foundation; the teams use it. One person can coordinate the whole, without becoming a compulsory checkpoint.
5. Measured. The right test is simple: three months after it is set up, is the memory still kept up to date?

In a mid-sized company: several business domains, several leads

The larger the company, the more this organisation matters: several business domains, several sites, sometimes several companies. The foundation guarantees consistency; the business domains keep their autonomy; access protects what must be protected. One lead per business domain, and one person coordinating the shared rules, without becoming a compulsory checkpoint.

Where to start

Not with everything. The shared foundation and one business domain are enough to start (the one that matters most to you, or one already covered by agents), with the trade-off and usage rules, and the agents already in service connected. The other business domains are added one by one, once the previous one has proved itself.

That is the scope of our Company Brain offer, in six to ten weeks. Its price is set for your case, after a free Scoping Meeting: it depends on your needs, the size of your company, and the volume and diversity of its knowledge. The knowledge of a business domain already covered by Business Agents is not charged a second time. It remains optional: Task Automation, the Process Agent and Business Agents can be bought without it. To understand why a shared memory matters: Why your AI agents need a shared memory and shared rules.